Adam Markel uses the Philadelphia Starbucks arrests anecdote to illustrate resilient leadership practices. He highlights CEO Kevin Johnson’s rapid acceptance of responsibility, the company’s decision to close 8,000 stores for four hours for unconscious-bias training (costing about $11 million), and draws lessons about self-awareness, transparency, and honest communication as core leadership behaviors.
Chapters
So let's talk about some things that might, might help us to be more resilient. And we know this brand, of course. I want you to imagine something right now, very quickly. Imagine that you and a colleague go into a local Starbucks. Everybody can imagine that. Raise your hand if you can imagine that. Terrific. Now when you imagine that you go to use the washroom and when you come out of the washroom your colleague is being arrested. Can you imagine that one? Little harder to imagine, but you can imagine it. Now I want you to imagine in that same scenario, the police ask you to turn around, put your arms behind your back and they cuff you too. Can you imagine that? Because that's exactly what happened at a Starbucks in April last year in Philadelphia where two African American men were arrested for apparently using the bathroom. Now we need to create another scenario. Pick up the phone, everybody. This is just the fun part. Pick up your old phone. Okay, there we go. We're picking up the phone because we're Kevin Johnson, who's the CEO of Starbucks, and you're now getting a phone call from somebody that tells you that two men were arrested in one of your stores for using the bathroom. Click. What do you do? Call it out. What's the first thing you do? That's right. You give your chair a hickey, right? That'll land in a second. You don't know what to do. So what do you do? You call up a lawyer, you call internal, your in house counsel. And what's the advice that you're going to receive? More likely than not. Come on, call it out. Let me hear you all the way in the back. What do you do? Somebody's got to get exactly press charges. Somebody's got to get fired off with their head. There's got to be a statement put out. There's PR concerns. This is a public company, just like assa. There's shareholders, stakeholders, market share. There's a lot of things on the line right now. Yes, hello. Yes, thank you. A lot is riding on this. And what do they do? They tell them the classic stuff, right? Blame. Find somebody to blame. That was easy. Justify, explain, make excuses. Is that what Kevin Johnson did? You guys remember, he gets on TV the next day, the next morning he gets on Good Morning America and what does he do? Do you remember? Thank you, sir. He takes responsibility. What? Everybody go, what? Let's say it like that. It's more fun. What? You might have to squeeze yourself when you say it. What? He takes responsibility. He owns it for the company. He says, I don't know what happened. We don't know what happened, but we're going to find out. All I can tell you is this is not who we are. This is not our culture. This is not what we're about. We're going to figure this out. And sure enough, over the course of the next two months, they reached a settlement with the two gentlemen, and he announced he was closing 8,000 stores. 8,000 stores for four hours for something called unconscious bias training. Had anybody ever heard of that before? I don't know if there are HR people in the room. I was a lawyer for a lot of years. I handled a lot of employment matters. I never heard that term, unconscious bias. I don't think Kevin Johnson had heard of it either. But it's a thing, and that's what they. And for four hours, he closed 8,000 stores. It cost the company 11. $11 million. How much money? Say it. It's a lot of money. $11 million to stand for something, to mean something, for his company, for the company itself to do something they didn't even know was going to work. Because unconscious bias training. Four hours. Is that going to solve the problem? What do you think? Not necessarily. Probably not. But is it a start? So what Kevin Johnson modeled in that moment that I think is significant is something called self awareness. What's the term? Self awareness? Self honesty. He was communicating with himself and. And communicating with this company and communicating with the marketplace in an open way, in a way that was transparent. Transparency is powerful. People use this word, authenticity. I think it's a bit watered down at this point. I don't personally buy that whole thing. We're being authentic. I don't know what authenticity even is, but I know what transparency is. That's when what you see is what you get in leadership in a company. Does that make sense? Transparency is communication. It's about how we communicate. Are we communicating honestly? When you were writing that list of what makes a great leader, was honesty among those things? Was it on that list that you knew where you stood with those people who. Hello? Yes. Yeah. You know where you stand. You may not like it all the time. Somebody's making decisions. Those decisions aren't always popular. Isn't that true? But when you know where you stand with somebody, you know how to guide yourself in the world, does that make sense?
